BP, the UK oil company, went on trial this week for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. The company could be fined up to $30 billion over the $25 billion it has promised if the court finds that it was "grossly negligent.”

The trial, which is being held in New Orleans, has three phases that are expected to last till the end of the year. The first phase is being heard by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier and has focused so far on the fact that the company slashed spending in the months before the spill.

Mark Bly, BP's executive vice president for safety and operational risk, who was in charge of the internal investigation of the spill, defended the cuts noting that the project was $60 million over budget. “I was never given a directive to cut corners or deliver something unsafe, but there was tremendous pressure to cut costs," he told the court.

Tony Hayward, former CEO of BP, also testified via videotape to say that he did not believe that cost-cutting measures prior to the spill adversely impacted operations.

But Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley engineering professor, testified to the court that BP failed to implement a two year-old safety management program on the Deepwater Horizon before the explosion. Bea, who worked as a safety consultant for BP, said that he had sent many warnings to company management. "You still don't get it," he says he told BP officials in 2007. "Process safety is deadly serious, and you've turned it into a traveling roadshow."

"Financially, BP had the resources to effectively put into place a process safety system that could have prevented the Macondo disaster,” Bea told the court. “It was too lean.”

Some have noted the irony of the Obama administration blaming BP. “Well before the disaster, Obama was making encouraging noises to the oil industry about permits for exploratory wells in new areas of the Gulf,” writes Dominic Rushe in the Guardian. “When things went wrong, Obama turned on BP. After the full scale of the disaster became apparent, Obama passed the buck in a style almost as slick as the spill.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Southern Environmental Law Center, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Oceana sued the Obama administration last July for issuing new permits to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. “Failing to fully analyze the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the potential of future spills before moving forward with drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is asking for another drilling catastrophe,” said Sierra Weaver, senior staff attorney for Defenders of Wildlife.